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Author: Brigid Del Carmen
Categories: 3rd Grade, Math

Have you ever wondered just where all the food in your house goes or why there is never hot water for your shower?  Do you want to get a better understanding of the daily activities of your family members and the amount of time they spend on them? Challenge your third-grader to survey members of your household and then use the data to create bar graphs representing each member’s day.  The results will probably surprise you – but your child’s interest in graphing may be the biggest shock of all!

What You Need:

  • paper
  • pencil
  • colored pencils or markers
  • graph paper (optional)
  • markers (optional)


What You Do:

Step 1:

Explain to your child that she is conducting an “investigation” to determine the amount of time each member of the household spends on daily activities.  With your third-grader, create a short survey to be completed by each family member.  Help her brainstorm questions, such as:

How much time do you spend:

sleeping? ______________
bathing / grooming?_______________
eating? ________________
driving? ________________
working? _______________
in school? _______________
talking on the phone? __________________
shopping? ____________________
watching television? _________________
doing homework? ____________________
reading? _________________
cooking? ________________
cleaning? ________________

Beginning the next day, family members should accurately record the number of minutes they spend on each activity. 

Step 2:

After all family members have completed their surveys, help your third-grader tally the results and create bar graphs.  Begin by making one bar graph for each family member.  Label the horizontal axis with the activities from the survey and label the vertical axis with minutes (in ten-minute intervals).  Encourage your child to shade in each activity with a different color and use the same colors on all of the graphs.  For example, if “talking on the phone” is shaded in blue on Johanna’s graph, shade it in blue on all of the graphs.